On trees, changing the image, and choosing life - JNF’s October 7, a year later

“One hundred twenty-three years ago, the Jewish National Fund was established, bringing a Jewish community dispersed throughout the world together.

“They repurchased our ancestral soil acre by acre.

“They helped establish the land of Israel for our Jewish people everywhere.

“Their voices then are our voices now.

“We were with you yesterday –We will be here when you return home.

“Today and everyday, we will tell our story in the names and spirit of those we lost on October 7 and since...”

Such were the words of the incoming JNF-USA president, Deb Lust Zaluda, at the Kibbutz Re’im October 7 anniversary memorial service.

The paradox of holding an anniversary to a day that seems unending to so many. A program named “Rebuilding Together” when our brothers and sisters are still reeling from destruction. Words of hope when all else seems lost.

An unprecedented challenge

JNF’s challenge is perhaps its biggest ever.

A year ago, the work would’ve seemed impossible: Aiding tens of kibbutzim and moshavim in Eshkol and Sha’ar Hanegev to receive proper care in their evacuation; twenty volunteer trips and counting, with thousands of entirely new volunteers from the very first days of the attack; relocation efforts, such as getting the Re’im residents back to the kibbutz; building dozens of parks, resilience and emergency response centers, a hydrotherapy center, a home front school in Gvulot, and a sports center named after Ofir Libstein, the heroic Eshkol council head who was killed on October 7, defending Kfar Aza. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested into rebuilding, including a joint venture with KKL after decades of a rift between the two.

Softly, yet passionately spoken, Yoel Rosby, JNF’s Israel project manager, reflects on the hardships: “The conversations [with survivors] were devastating. It’s not about benches or painting; it was a conversation about love and community. The vision [for JNF’s missions] was so that the people, Moshe and Sara, and Geffen and Aviv, can get into their car from the golden cage known as the hotels they were evacuated to, drive to their home that was violated, destroyed, pull up, go into the yellow gate of the community, and say someone gave a damn, someone showed up, someone was here, and they made it beautiful.

“The opportunity that I’ve been given, from a kid growing up in a small town in Texas, to be able to raise a flag and do this is amazing.”

It seems that Russell Robinson, JNF-USA’s CEO, remained a small-town boy in his heart, as he corrects me: “We don’t call it the periphery. It’s the frontier.”

With democratic leadership and structure that connects top-down and bottom-up efforts and having the tough conversations with residents that make them feel seen, as Rosby explains, it’s this infectious love for Israel’s border region that thus allows JNF to walk hand in hand with the residents around the Gaza border area, not past them or beyond them.

Robinson tells me: “When the residents of Kibbutz Re’im voted to come back, this big guy comes up to me, starts sticking his fingers and yelling at me, saying “I’m not moving back. My children are scared.” I told him, “I’ll make a deal with you –You’re not moving back today. Tomorrow, maybe a year, maybe two years, you’ve got to swear to me right now that when you do walk back, you’ll call me and let me walk through the gates with you.

“He came back two months ago, and he called me after he got through the gates, and he said, “You were there; you just don’t know it.”

JNF’s October 7 tour, titled “We Choose Life,” appropriately started in Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz that was established by Polish Shomer HaTzair members in 1943 from land, yet unfarmed, purchased by the JNF. The land was named after Mordechai Anielewicz, a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising leader and perhaps one of the most true-to-life prototypes of Muskeljudentum (Muscular Judaism).

JNF’s ideas and goals of “changing the image of Israel,” as Robinson puts it, rest on a very long foundation of pioneers molding the Jewish identity.

Appropriately then, Mordechai’s towering, heroic figure, one of strength and resilience, looks out towards a place whose current image in our minds is of complete death and destruction.

It may take as long as the Zionist dream has taken to bear fruit, but perhaps the western Negev can bring back to life its own image as well.

JNF tells The Jerusalem Post, “The story of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai is one of extraordinary resilience, it is the symbol of our Jewish people’s capacity to rise from adversity and rebuild in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.”

Our guide, Tamar, from the Yad Mordechai museum and an evacuee from the kibbutz, represented the kibbutz’s spirit: “In Hebrew, we say ‘Af al pi chen.’ ‘Nonetheless, nevertheless, however.’ Despite everything, we persist, we build, we create.”

It takes a village. Among the other speakers are Doron Almog, the Jewish Agency CEO; “The State of Israel is a partnership between all Jews in the world,” and Ifat Ovadia Luski, head of KKL-JNF, recently immersed in efforts to build a whole prefabricated neighborhood for the Kfar Aza community in Ruhama: “Seeing missions coming to Israel during wartime will never be taken for granted, and our connection with the Jewish diaspora has strengthened so much over the past year.”

And perhaps it all starts and ends with a small tree.

For better or worse, trees are a foundational tool and a piece of Israel’s history that JNF and KKL have turned into a symbol of fortification, re-population, and growth.

In an empty field in Kibbutz Re’im, right in front of destroyed houses where families once lived, the group had planted a few trees, as will the thousands and thousands more who have come, are coming, and will come to continue saying boker tov, showing up, building, and writing the story of this country.

Lust Zaluda exclaims:

“Our challenge is unmistakably clear.

“We must believe.

We must believe in hope.

“We must believe in life.

“Let us continue to put our arms around each other.

“Am Yisrael Chai!”